10.She Just Wants to Be Happy

The story of Sophie — a young woman who built the floor she never had, one brick at a time, and arrived at the life she always meant to have.

She was sitting at her dining room table, working from home, when she looked out of the window and saw a pigeon.

She doesn’t know why that particular bird on that particular day. She just looked at it, and something opened up, and she said the thing she had been carrying for years and had never been able to say to anyone because it hurt everyone around her too much to hear it.

I miss you. And I’m sorry we didn’t have the best relationship before you passed away.

She said it to a pigeon. She cried. And then the bird flew off and she sat there thinking: that was the weirdest thing. And also: that helped.

Sophie was thirteen when her auntie died. A lymphoma diagnosed at Christmas, kept quiet, gone within five months. Grace — Sophie’s cousin, who had come to live with them as a baby — was left without her tummy mummy. Years of not being able to talk about it because the grief belonged to everyone and there was nowhere to put her own piece of it.

She told Rhys about the pigeon afterwards. She was slightly embarrassed. She is also completely unembarrassed. Both things are true of Sophie. She is full of layers. She will be the first to tell you.

Layers

She introduces herself as Sophie and says, immediately and laughing, that there is more to her than the bobblehead bubbly crazy girl who is always joking. There are layers. She references Shrek’s onion. She is twenty-two and she already knows exactly why she leads with brightness — because it is a boundary, not a performance.

If someone forms a bad opinion of her before they know her, she reasons, it is not really about her. It’s just about the initial. And also, she adds with the particular confidence of someone who has won people over enough times to know she can do it: we will be friends and you will like me.

She grew up in a house where the living room was a showroom. The door stayed shut. They ate dinner separately her mum, her sister, Sophie herself each in their own rooms. The family unit was real and also a little lonely and also hers, because it was all she had.

She is not angry about it. She tells it the way she tells everything: directly, with humour when the humour fits, and without asking anyone to feel sorry for her. She has already done the work of understanding it. She typed her thoughts into an AI late at night when everything was too much and she had nowhere else to put it. She is, she says, very organised. She has a to-do list. She has a calendar. She has a gym schedule and a food shop day and time blocked out every day just for herself, even if it is only the podcast she listens to while she cleans.

These are not personality quirks. These are the architecture of a person who had no stable floor and spent years building one.

The Floor She Built

She moved between her mum’s and her dad’s and her boyfriend’s family’s house and back again with a frequency that would have untethered most people. She stopped a college course. She watched teachers mock her in a call she had accidentally joined early. She made the decision to pursue an apprenticeship instead, alone, with no one to tell her it was the right choice, with a pit in her stomach and the particular bravery of someone who has always had to figure it out for themselves.

It was the right choice. She knows that now. She wouldn’t be where she is without it.

She has her own home now. She has a partner who loves her. She has a job that stimulates her brain and a savings account she is building towards five or ten thousand pounds because she needs to know, in her body, that she has a floor. That if everything shifted she would be okay. That she would not wake up one day back in a situation with no money, no car, no job, no idea where she was going.

“I just don’t want anything to be taken away from me that I’ve worked for.”

She has gone two years without running out of toilet roll. She mentions this with the same weight as everything else. Because for a girl who ate dinner alone in her bedroom and had no living room to sit in, having a home that runs properly, that she runs, that she keeps, is not a small thing. It is the whole thing.

Grace

Her cousin (her auntie’s daughter) came to live with them when she was less than a year old. Her mum, Sophie’s auntie, was in a situation she couldn’t stay in. Social services. A special guardianship. And then Sophie’s mum took her in, and Sophie had a little sister, and the little sister had rolls on rolls and the huskiest voice and on her first night home she bounced around on the sofa in her baby grow, excited to be somewhere new.

Sophie loved her from the start.

As the years went on and her mum was flying for work, Sophie walked to the childminder after school. She saved a portion of her wages to pay for taxis home because the walk was too far for a small girl. She did tea. She stayed overnight when she had to. She sat Grace down and said: we are in this together. You are not alone. I am here.

She was a child doing this. A teenager.

And then Sophie’s auntie died. Grace’s tummy mummy. Grace was five. She was too young to understand what had happened, too young to process it, just old enough to feel the hole it left. The grief had nowhere to go. As Grace got older she started running away at night through a bedroom window that opened both ways for that exact purpose. Her behaviour escalated in the way that behaviour always escalates when there is pain that has no container and nobody who quite knows what to do with it.

Sophie kept showing up. And then Sophie was eventually told by someone she trusted that she should step back. That it wasn’t good for her. That she didn’t want Grace to end up living with her.

She stepped back.

She found Grace’s care home number on the bottom of an email chain. She called. She started visiting every week. Things looked positive. And then Grace was given more freedom and things went in a direction Sophie saw on social media and couldn’t ignore, and she said: I’m happy to help you but you need to meet me halfway.

She was blocked.

“I’m not going to completely abandon her. I couldn’t do that because I’ve felt a taste of what that can be like.”

She says this quietly. She knows what it is to reach for someone and find nothing there. She will not do that to Grace. Even blocked. Even from a distance. She is still holding the door open.

What She Chose Instead

She could have chosen bitterness. She had more than enough material for it. The instability. The loneliness. The living room that was a showroom. The teachers who mocked her. The cousin she tried to save and couldn’t. The auntie she lost before she could say what needed saying.

She chose kindness. Completely, deliberately, as a way of life.

A man gave her road rage yesterday. She smiled at him through the window. She thought: you’re having a worse day than me. She is not naive about it. She is not a pushover. She just decided, at some point and without fanfare, that what was done to her would not become what she does.

She calls her grandma every day. Her grandma lives in Staffordshire and doesn’t go out much and her granddad goes to golf and the parish council and she sits in the house and Sophie calls so she has someone to talk to. She spoils the whole plot of whatever she watched on television. Her grandma talks about her auntie, the daughter she lost, because Sophie is the one she feels safe doing that with.

She goes to South Africa in her memory sometimes. Seventeen years old, staying at a lodge with rehomed lions and tigers, cooking over a campfire, looking one direction at the Johannesburg Mall and the other direction at slums and thinking: it just depends on where you’re born. She was supposed to go back for a month of work experience. COVID came. She never went.

She still thinks about who she would be if she had.

She thinks about a lot of things. She is an overthinker by her own admission. She has lived things, killed them, had them come back 3,000 times. She has good friends who she is completely selective about and fiercely loyal to, the kind who will call her at any hour and know she will pick up. She has a dream about a house on a massive piece of land with animals and chickens and children in wellies and sandstone floors and fruit and vegetables from her own garden and a radio playing in the background always.

She is twenty-three. She has time. She is manifesting it anyway, just to be safe.

*

Truly, Truly Happy

Near the beginning of the conversation, she was asked to complete a sentence.

I am a woman who.

She thought about it for a moment. And then:

I am a woman who wants to be happy. That’s it.

And then she was asked: are you?

She said yes. Without hesitation. And then said it again, slowly, as if she wanted to make sure she actually heard it herself.

Truly, truly happy.

She has her own home. She has her person. She has her routines and her savings and her core friends who are her family and her grandma on the phone every day and the gym and the podcast while she cleans and the dream of the country house and the radio and the wellies.

She has a dining room table that is hers. A window she can look out of. The ability to say the things that need saying, even if sometimes the only listener available is a pigeon.

She is building it all herself, block by block, the way you do when no one built it for you.

She is Sophie. She is twenty-three. She has layers.

And she is, at last, exactly where she always wanted to be.